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Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post have accused artificial intelligence startup Perplexity of a “brazen scheme” to tear off their journalism for its AI-powered search engine in a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday.
The publishers, each subsidiaries of News Corp, claimed that the AI start-up, which is trying to raise as much as $1 billion in a funding round that will likely be valued at $8 billion, was engaging in “large-scale criminal activity.” copies” of their works.
The lawsuit said Perplexity diverted “customers and important revenue” away from news publishers, whose titles include The Wall Street Journal, and “free-rided on the invaluable content the publishers produce.”
Perplexity's search engine allows users to get fast answers to questions with sources and citations using large language models (LLMs) from platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic.
However, his “response machine” copies on a “massive scale.” . . copyrighted news content, evaluation and opinions as inputs to its internal database,” the lawsuit states. These then generate responses to user queries “which might be intended to, and indeed act as, substitutes for news and other information web sites,” says the lawsuit, whose claims also include copyright infringement.
The lawsuit is the newest conflict between publishers and AI corporations that need to use content to coach their models and supply users with up-to-date answers.
Some, like OpenAI, have signed industrial partnerships and licensing agreements with publishers, including News Corp and the Financial Times, that are among the many newspapers that allow ChatGPT users to view chosen summaries, quotes and attribute links.
But publishers are also increasingly calling for legal motion to stop AI-driven engines like google from illegally removing copyrighted works. The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and sent Perplexity a “stop and desist” letter last week asking the corporate to stop using its journalism, including the creation of summaries and other kinds of content.
Monday's lawsuit also alleged that Perplexity harms brands by falsely attributing certain content to them and sometimes generating “responses” with false information. In July, the publishers sent a letter to the startup alerting it to the legal issues and offering to debate a possible licensing deal, the lawsuit said, but Perplexity “didn’t hassle to reply.” “.
“Perplexity is an abuse of mental property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp,” said News Corp CEO Robert Thomson. “The Astonishing Perplexity has intentionally copied large amounts of copyrighted material without compensation and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the unique source.”
Forbes and Wired have accused Perplexity of plagiarism, with the latter branding the startup “A bullshit machine” after an investigation reportedly revealed the corporate was “secretly” mining web sites for data.
Perplexity previously told publishers that it might not use “crawling” technology and has since launched a revenue sharing initiative. The company also plans to introduce promoting on its platform to advertise similar brands similar to news outlets to extend sales.
Perplexity didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
